A historian follows Georges Perec's family back to a Polish shtetl
Claire Zalc's new book, "Le Monde de Lubartów," traces the Jewish population of a Polish town between 1920 and 1950 — including the paternal family of Georges Perec — and has drawn a review from philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman.
The historian Claire Zalc has published "Le Monde de Lubartów," an investigation into the Jewish population of the Polish town of Lubartów between 1920 and 1950, according to Télérama. Among the family histories she reconstructs is that of the paternal side of Georges Perec, whose father's family came from the town.
Télérama describes the book as rigorous in its scholarship while also delivering what it calls edifying personal stories drawn from the archive, a combination the paper presents as the source of the book's appeal.
The book has also drawn the attention of the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, who wrote about it for Diacritik under the title "Les faits d'affects de Georges Didi-Huberman (et le monde de Lubartów de Claire Zalc)." Diacritik notes that what Didi-Huberman values above all is dialectic, and that his sensibility and intellect are, in its words, spontaneously dialectical — a frame he brings to his reading of Zalc's work.
For readers who have followed Perec's own reconstructions of his family's vanished world — most famously in "W ou le souvenir d'enfance" — Zalc's history of Lubartów offers an outside, archival counterpart to that project, tracing on the ground the community the writer could only approach through memory and invention.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
